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How Much is a Dragon Worth, Revisited

Last year, to quell lingering suspicions that we simply “make-up” the net worth numbers for the Fictional 15, our annual ranking of the richest fictional characters, I decided to publish the calculations behind my evaluation of Smaug’s fortune, the dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (See “How Much is a Dragon Worth.”)

Taking into account a variety of factors including the estimated length of a dragon (64 feet), how many scales he has on his belly (822), the percentage of air in the treasure mound (30%) and the price of gold, silver and diamonds I estimated the ancient wyrm to be worth $8.6 billion.

The Internet disagreed.

Citing errors in everything from the value of the “Arkenstone of Thrain” to the price of mithril armor, Fictional 15 fans critiqued nearly every aspect of my calculation, usually concluding that I had vastly underestimated the old flamethrower’s net worth. One reader, gvbezoff, pegged Smaug’s wealth to be $870 billion, calling it a “conservative estimate.” For context, that’s about 12.5 times richer than Carlos Slim Helu, the planet’s richest non-fictional being.

Still, I am man enough to admit to making a few imaginary errors. So I carefully recalculated Smaug’s net worth taking into account the comments on last year’s post. And the Internet was right. He is worth a lot more than $8.6 billion. $53.4 billion more in fact. Let’s go point by point:

Dragon Length: This was a big charred bone of contention, and rightfully so since the overall length of the dragon is fundamental to determining the volume of the treasure mound that he can comfortably sleep upon, and thus the size of his fortune. Last year, I based Smaug’s length (64 feet) on an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons website, then loped off 70% as being tail (the proportion of tail to body for a Komodo Dragon). Apparently this was an error. Geniesolmyr writes:

I’m afraid you were wrong, according to the D&D sourcebook (3rd Edition, ISBN 0-7869-2884-0), p36, p48 and p51, a dragon’s body length means “The dragon’s overall length, less its neck and tail. Measured from the front of the shoulders to the base of the tail.” And Smaug’s body length is approximately between 33ft. to 35ft., or 34 feet in average. He’s body width is approximately 15ft.

Turbogigity insisted that Smaug is even larger:

At the risk of showing just how nerdy I really am, I am compelled to point out that an ancient red dragon has a much larger body length than 19.2 feet. Indeed, the source that is quoted in this very article indicates that it is 64 feet from the snout to the base of the tail. Ergo, the body length alone is 64 feet, meaning that the size of the mound of treasure, and thus the total net worth, has been greatly underestimated.

Now, I’m not about get into a debate about dragon lengths with folks who know the International Standard Book Number for Draconomicon, but this just doesn’t pass the smell test. Sixty-four feet is longer than an 18-wheeler tractor trailer. And if that is just 30% of his overall length, Smaug would be approximately 215 feet long, roughly the length of a New York City block. Even using the most restrictive assumptions that dragon would have to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yet experience tells us that fictional fortunes track real life ones and listing Smaug as worth five times as much as say, Bill Gates, strains even fictional credibility. Maybe when Peter Jackson releases his upcoming movie version of The Hobbit we will get a truer idea of the beast’s size. Until then, I’m sticking with 64 feet, including tail.

Dragon Sleeping Position: Last year, I assumed (naively) that a dragon could curl up comfortably on a treasure mound with the same diameter as his body length. Ricardo gave it more thought. Way more thought:

The argument that the dragon can curl up comfortably on a mound with the same diameter as his body-length, at best, begs the question. It does not account for the way the dragon is curled up. Is it nose-to-base-of-tail? Is it nose-to-tip-of-tail? Is it like the picture in the article, where the dragon lays across the mound and curls the tail around half the mound so that the tip of the tail meets the nose and the wings cover the rest?

My preferred case, because it is consistent with the diamonds becoming incrusted in the dragon’s belly, is when it lays across the mound and wraps the tail around, like in the picture. In this way, part of the dragon covers the Diameter and the rest covers half the Perimeter. We can express this as Diameter + (1/2) Perimeter = complete length, or D + (1/2)*Pi*D = 64 ft. This gives 24.90 ft as the mound’s diameter.

Ricardo, you are my kind of nerd: Adjusting mound diameter to 24.9 feet.

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Don’t forget it’s specifically mentioned that Frodo’s mithril armor is worth enough to buy the entire Shire. I’m not sure how much the Shire is worth, but I’m willing to bet Smaug has several sets of mithril armor meant for creatures larger than a hobbit.

Well I’m not sure as to the worth of the Shire… But it’s main export is “Longbottom Leaf” – which is also known as “Pipe-Weed” (aka Tobacco). The shire is considered to grow the finest pipe-weed in all of middle earth. I should also point out that hobbits are rather fond of nice (altho small) comfortable dwellings. Hobbits are very industrious and into “sweat equity” — So there is likely a decent value in real estate in the shire. As for other “stuff”, Hobbits tend to live fairly simple lives and are fond of giving each other “mathoms” (old family gadunzahs) … so there is likely little value there.

Late to the game, but have to ask whether the worth of the Shire is really the right measurement for Forbes, even if that is the appropriate measurement for Middle Earth. Every other calculation has been based on Earth market valuations; if the mithril shirt uses the same principle, the value of the Shire is irrelevant. Rather, we should use the greater of the shirt’s value as the greatest protective vest ever seen, or the value of a new metallurgical sample of incredible strength and lightness. I’m guessing a corporation would gladly pay up ridiculous amounts of cash to give to their material engineers.

Well, since we are playing with the idea, I think we ought to try and calculate the value of the mithril coat. In The Lord of the rings we are told that ‘its worth was greater than the value of the whole Shire and everything in it.’

The Shire is about 40 by 50 leagues at the greatest distances – say 1400 square leagues or just about 8 million acres of prime Western Midlands agricultural property with ‘everything in it’.

Current prices for Warwickshire property seems to fluctuate quite a bit, but about a million pounds per ten acres seems a reasonable guesstimate of the average price for larger estates.

This makes for a nice round total of some 800 billion (8×10^11) British pounds, or, in American parlour, about a trillion US Dollars . . .

Some further investigations seem to indicate that I may have to adjust this figure downward. The figure for land-prices that I used was mainly for estates, while agricultural land is only about a tenth of that price.

However, even using the lower price (assuming the error due to forest and other unfarmed areas to be roughly the same as the error due to ignoring the higher value of developed areas), we still need to adjust Smaug’s value by some $100 billion due to the possession of the mithril shirt.

Bilbo receives this shirt as a “first payment” of his reward: that is, Thorin considers the worth of the mithril shirt to be less than 1/14 of the total value of the treasure – and I am certainly not one to argue the value of treasure with a competent Dwarf like Thorin :-) Thus we still end up in excess of a trillion US dollars.

Very good point. If something as rare as gold (which is actually worthless in terms of what you can actually use it for) is worth thtat much, something as rare as mitril (which can actually be used for stuff) should be worth substantially more.

Love the fictional 15 spirit on display here! As mentioned in the post, you’ve got to be careful when the numbers start getting that big. There are plenty of characters (particularly in science fiction) that own entire planets and/or multi-galactic corporations. You could value these in the trillions, if not hundreds of trillions of dollars. We have always taken the approach that the fortunes of the fictional, once translated into our “real” universe would not be orders of magnitude out of line with the real life fortunes of billionaires. Otherwise the list stops being a fun parody and simply becomes an exercise in hyperbole.

It’d be fun to know the gold-value of land in the West Midlands shires in medieval times, and try to calculate a historical gold-equivalent of the land for use of in the calculation (I suspect that the gold price of land has gone up, so that my calculation of the worth of the mithril shirt is too high).

I still do think, however, that it will make a significant contribution to the total of the treasure.

In 651 “Edmond Worth and George his son” sold “the manor of Grylston, and 1,250 acres of land therein” for 300 marks, or 200 pounds of silver. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=64198

If we take this value as an upper limit, we get 1600 pounds of silver for 10,000 acres, which would give a value of the Shire of 1,280,000 pounds of silver. Allowing that the quality of these 1250 acres may have been above average, let’s say a round million pounds of Silver for all of the Shire.

This would put the value of the Shire at 360 million US dollars (assuming a price of $30 per ounce silver) when we convert the AD 651 silver value of the land to modern silver values. As I assumed this was less than the current value of the same amount of land, though I will admit to being surprised at how much less.

This will, however, make more sense in terms of Thorin considering the mithril shirt a mere beginning of the fourteenth share of the total. If the total is valued at 70 billion, the forteenth share would be 5 billion and the 360 million would be a reasonable beginning (roughly a fifteenth of what Bilbo, according to the agreement, would have coming).